CHAPTER 465: CHAPTER 463: THE DILEMMA OF RECONSTRUCTION (REQUEST FOR MONTHLY TICKETS)

In the command room of the rescue team at the settlement point, Chen Xin was studying the map, contemplating how to rebuild the city.

Currently, most of the surviving disaster victims have been relocated to two settlement points. According to the local city government’s statistics, the two settlement points now house approximately no more than 200,000 disaster victims.

During this disaster, more than 300,000 people unfortunately lost their lives.

Thanks to the efforts of the rescue teams and the later supporting paratroopers, approximately 210,000 bodies have been recovered from the ruins, with a significant number still unidentifiable and incomplete.

In total, more than 80,000 bodies remain deeply buried in the collapsed ruins of the city, making recovery impossible.

Besides, over 95% of the city’s shelters have been completely destroyed. Most have collapsed entirely, some partially, and the few remaining shelters have cracks and partial damage, rendering them unusable.

All food and material production in the city has halted. Currently, the 200,000 disaster victims rely entirely on the supplies brought by the rescue teams for survival, with significant consumption and shortages.

If material supply cannot be restored in the short term, it will be challenging to ensure the survival of these remaining 200,000 disaster victims, relying solely on transport by the ark.

The city’s water and electricity supply has been entirely disrupted. The settlement point’s drinking water relies on a temporary water purifier made by Chen Xin, melting snow for support.

However, this is only the disaster situation in this one city.

This earthquake affected the entire Southwest Region, including Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou provinces, with an unprecedentedly wide disaster area and large affected population in Flame Country’s history.

Though the severity varies across different areas, the city Chen Xin is in is one of the most heavily affected regions, yet the situations are largely similar.

Lack of clothing and food, cut-off water and food supply, despite the state’s active rescue organization, remain the primary issues facing the disaster zone.

Apart from that, resettling the disaster victims is also an essential consideration for the region, as it is impossible to let them stay in temporary tents indefinitely.

Rebuilding the city and constructing new shelters, to allow victims to settle nearby, is naturally the ideal plan.

Yet, reconstructing a city, even before the disaster, is an enormous project. In the current apocalyptic extreme cold environment, construction is exceedingly difficult.

Moreover, from Chen Xin’s perspective, rebuilding the city on its original site remains a time-consuming and labor-intensive choice with inherent risks.

Regions that have experienced massive destructive earthquakes typically face aftershocks in the following years as the previous earthquakes have disrupted the crustal structure, making them points of energy release from tectonic movements.

The plates are constantly moving, and once the accumulated energy reaches a certain level, it must be released, usually in the form of earthquakes or volcanic eruptions.

Though this Southwest earthquake was a release of energy, the impact of a meteorite collision and super volcanic eruptions on the plates and geological structures will last for a considerable time. It is unlikely this destructive earthquake will be the only one.

Thus, according to Chen Xin’s judgment, a safer approach would be to relocate residents from geologically active zones to more stable areas to avoid further earthquake disasters.

However, this is an overly ideal solution requiring more substantial human and material resources.

When the disaster struck, Flame Country indeed relocated populations from several southeastern coastal provinces to inland areas. However, this was accomplished when transportation, communication, production, and construction forces were not impaired and faced unprecedented concentration due to the disaster’s life-and-death threat.

Now, although the Southwest Region has potential safety hazards, it has not reached the point where all populations need to be evacuated.

Moreover, the state cannot manage to migrate and resettle the population of the three provinces in the Southwest now.

So, the only feasible and practical method now is to construct new shelters nearby.

Yet, saying it comes easily with the light pressing of upper lip to lower lip, actually building new shelters under such extreme adverse conditions is no easy task.

The current harsh environment is comparable to the North and South Poles, even surpassing them.

At least at the North and South Poles, there is sunlight for half the year, making temperatures somewhat milder.

Even before the disaster, countries around the world had not built any large-scale buildings in the poles, with only a few research stations erected.

Certainly, this was to protect the polar ecological environments, avoiding extensive excavation, but it also reflects that humanity does not possess the necessary conditions for large-scale construction in Antarctica.

Strong winds, permafrost, and extreme cold are all bottlenecks for construction.

Even if Chen Xin could replace construction machinery with Titan to greatly enhance construction efficiency, reconstructing a city remains challenging.

"Flatten all the debris of the district’s buildings, level a piece of land for city reconstruction..." Chen Xin browses the map, troubled with how to rebuild the city and the shelters.

Technically speaking, flattening the debris and leveling the ground isn’t difficult, similar to the earlier work completed by Titan, requiring only a little time to accomplish.

For city reconstruction, building surface buildings alone isn’t hard. Using cabins and tents as a base for permanent modification, the current two settlement points can be transformed into relatively habitable complexes.

The main challenge hindering the reconstruction of the disaster area remains material shortages. Without adequate building materials, even if construction proceeds, it’s impossible to erect buildings.

Acquiring materials is only possible if the state reopens land transportation lines. Otherwise, relying solely on airborne drops or ark transport will deplete all logistics capacity just to sustain the disaster victims’ lives.

Moreover, besides lacking materials, Chen Xin hesitates about the unrecovered bodies buried in the rubble.

This isn’t a small number but exceeds ten thousand bodies.

These ten thousand people either were buried in collapsed shelters during the earthquake, never escaping, or died when surface buildings collapsed after escaping, leaving their bodies buried under mass building debris, making recovery nearly impossible.

Flattening the debris inevitably destroys the unrecovered bodies within.

Doing so would mean building the new city over the bodies of these victims.

Morally and ethically, Chen Xin hesitates profoundly.

The living are sure to be more critical, but those deceased are the friends and relatives of the surviving 200,000. Could they genuinely accept rebuilding the city over their friends’ and relatives’ remains?